The State of Pillow
The State of Pillow
How it started
Frustrated with seeing the proliferation of third party repackagings of PIL all containing identical or similar packaging fixes none of which were hosted by the Python Package Index, on July 31, 2010 Alex Clark forked the Python Imaging Library with Hanno Schlicting's changes to setup.py, and published the results to the Python Package Index as Pillow 1.0. [^1]
How it's going
Pillow has become the de facto PIL: successfully providing a modern alternative to PIL for the last 10 years, adding Python 3 support, remaining active while PIL development stalled, getting development funded for four part time developers [^3] and taking over ownership of the PIL project on the Python Packaging Index as suggested by the Python Packaging Authority. [^2].
The Story of Pillow
In this talk, Alex Clark will regale Plonistas in attendance with the "tale of the little fork that could", Pillow, including such topics as
- History
- First few years
- Mainstream adoption
- Enter: Tidelift
- Lessons
- Future
See you there! Thank you PloneConf for the opportunity.
[^1]: https://github.com/python-pillow/grant-proposal2#history
[^2]: https://pypi.org/project/PIL/
[^3]: https://www.tidelift.com/subscription/pkg/pypi-pillow
